Prince Harry has alleged that his brother, Prince William lashed out and physically attacked him during a furious argument over their deteriorating relationship.
The allegation is one of the many startling allegations in a new memoir that includes revelations about the estranged royal’s drug-taking, first sexual encounter and role in killing people during his military service in Afghanistan.
In the ghostwritten memoir, titled “Spare,” Harry said that his brother Prince William lashed out during a furious argument over the siblings’ deteriorating relationship.
According to Associated Press which said it purchased a Spanish-language copy of the book ahead of its publication in 16 languages around the world which started yesterday, Tuesday.
Harry recounts a 2019 argument at his Kensington Palace home, in which he says William called Harry’s wife, the former actor Meghan Markle, “difficult,” “rude” and “abrasive.” Harry said William grabbed his brother by the collar and ripped his necklace before knocking him down.
“I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me,” Harry says in the passage.
Harry says he had scrapes and bruises as a result of the tussle, for which William later apologized.
The allegation is one of a slew in a book that exposes painful, intimate — and in some cased contested — details about the lives of Harry and other members of the royal family.
The memoir is the latest in a string of public revelations and accusations by Harry and Meghan that have shaken Britain’s royal family.
It includes Harry’s assertion that he killed 25 people while serving as an Apache helicopter co-pilot and gunner in 2012 as part of Britain’s military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He said he felt neither pride nor shame about his actions, and in the heat of battle regarded enemy combatants as pieces being removed from a chessboard.
Harry spent a decade in the British Army — years he has described as his happiest because they allowed him a measure of normality — before taking up full-time royal duties in 2015.
The book recounts Harry’s decades of disenchantment with his privileged, scrutinized and constrained royal life. In it he alludes to the book’s title, recounting the alleged words of his father, then Prince Charles, to his mother, Princess Diana, on the day of his birth: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an heir and a spare-my work is done.”
While William was destined from birth to be king, Harry, who is fifth in line to the throne behind his brother and William’s three children, has often appeared to struggle with the more ambiguous role of “spare.”
In the book Harry describes his rebellious teenage years. He recounts how he lost his virginity to an older woman in a field behind a pub and describes how he took cocaine when he was 17.